In recent decades, feminists have focused attention on the work that women do to provide care to dependent and needy populations - children, the elderly, the ill and the the disabled. Essential as such carework is for the society as a whole as well as for the individuals who receive it, care work providers typically find themselves penalized financially rather than rewarded for the valuable work they do. Women may be realizing and responding to this negative incentive structure by doing less carework, whether by having fewer children or by seeking market alternatives for carework provision. Changes in women's carework commitments lead some commentators to see a "crisis" in carework.



What are the dimensions of the carework problem in Europe and the U.S., and how are policy-makers, labor activists and feminists defining what needs to be done about it? How might this society offer more adequate financial compensation to those who do carework? What are the mechanisms that are available, and what are the pros and cons of adopting different sorts of systems to reward caregivers? Does commodifying carework interfere with the interpersonal dimensions of caring that both recipients and careworkers value? What sort of incentives for carework tend to pull women out of the labor market and which ones help careworkers to combine this labor with other types of work? Do certain structures of reward tend to bring more men into carework and if so, should gender desegregation of carework be a policy goal?



We intend this workshop to be a spur to discussion of these and related questions by offering some comparative perspectives on carework. Beginning with mother's pensions in the late 19th century, European governments have tried various strategies to offer compensation for carework. While the U.S. is highly unlikely to imitate any of these specific policies, there is much we can learn from the positive and negative consequences of European approaches for different groups in different settings. Feminists and labor activists have pointed out the diversity among women who provide care, and the consequent conflicts of interest among those whom different policies might affect differently because of their social class, race, age/ generation, marital status, or other factors. By encouraging a dialogue among those with experience in European systems and those whose academic, policy making, or activist experience has been in the US, we hope to spur creative thinking about policy strategies that might prove valuable for many diverse types of caregivers. Since the United States typically does social policy by beginning with experiments at the state and local level, only gradually extending them into national programs, policy makers, activists, and scholars who know the state and local system have important insights into what makes it possible to try certain experiments and not others in the local policy context.

Workshop Agenda

Participants in the April 2002 workshop

Paula England (Northwestern Univ.) • Ute Gerhard (Univ. of Frankfurt & Carl Schurz Visiting Professor)

Barbara Hobson (Univ. of Stockholm, Sweden) • Cheryl Hercus (James Cook Univ., Townsville, Australia)

Barrie Thorne (Univ. of California, Berkeley) • Sylvia Walby (Univ. of Leeds, Great Britain)

KT Albiston (UW, Law School) • Tonya Brito (UW, Law School)

Lynet Uttal (UW, Child and Family Studies) • Julie Whitaker (UW, Sociology)

Victoria Mayer (UW, Sociology) • Ellen Bravo (9-to-5, National)

Pamela Fendt (Milwaukee Center for Economic Development) • Robert Kraig (SEIU, WI State Council)

Mary Rowin (WI Dept of Workforce Development) • Peggy Haack (Center for Childcare Workforce)

Barbara Hobson is professor of Sociology at Stockholm University and Director of its Advanced Research School in Comparative Gender Studies, a graduate program with a truly international student body. She is a founder and current editor of Social Politics, a US-based journal of comparative gender policy studies. She is the author of Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution in the American Reform Tradition (1987), and her research interests are in welfare state formation, women's economic dependency and social citizenship. Her recent books include two edited collections: Making Men into Fathers: Men, Masculinities and the Social Politics of Fatherhood (2002) and Gender and Citizenship in Transition (2000) and she is directing a third collaborative research group on gender, race, class identities and the politics of recognition in comparative perspective which should have a book out soon as well.

Paula England is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and a former editor of the American Sociological Review. She is the author of Comparable Worth: Theories and Evidence (1992), and edited Industries, Firms, and Jobs: Sociological and Economic Approaches (with George Farkas 1994) and Theory on Gender/Feminism on Theory (1993). Among her recent articles are: "The Wage Penalty for Motherhood" (American Sociological Review, 2001), "The Devaluation of Women's Work," (American Journal of Sociology, 2000), and "Is There a Supply Side to Occupational Sex Segregation?" (Sociological Perspectives, 1999).

Sylvia Walby is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, UK. She is the author of Patriarchy at Work: Patriarchal and Capitalist Relations in Employment (1986), Theorizing Patriarchy (1990), and Gender Transformation (1997), and editor of European Societies: Fusion or Fission (1999), New Agendas for Women (1999) and Out of the Margins: Women's Studies in the 1990s (1991). Her recent articles include: "New Survey Methodologies in Researching Violence Against Women" (British Journal of Criminology, 2001), "Against Epistemological Chasms: The Science Question in Feminism Revisted" (Signs, 2001) "The New Regulatory State: the social powers of the European Union" (British Journal of Sociology, 1999).

Barrie Thorne is Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and serves as Co-Director of the UC Berkeley Center for Working Families. She is the author of Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School (1993) and co-editor of Feminist Sociology: Life-Histories of a Movement (with Barbara Laslett 1993). Her current research project, "California Childhoods: Growing Up and Bringing Up Children in Contemporary Urban California" studies social facets of community development, such as children's well-being, family supports, and how communities can provide healthier social contexts, looking at communities that vary in social class and ethnic composition, including White, Latino, Asian American and immigrant, and African American families.

Ute Gerhard is Professor of Sociology at the Johann-Wolfgang- Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany, and the Director of the Cornelia Goethe Center for Research on Gender and Women. Her work combines sociological, historical and legal analysis. Her work translated into English includes Debating Women's Equality (Rutgers, 2001) and recent articles such as "'Anything but a suffragette!' Women's Politics in Germany after 1945" (2000), "Legal Particularism and the Complexity of Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century Germany" (2000) and "Women's Working Time in a Historical Perspective: The Ambivalence of Protective Laws" (1999). At the Cornelia Goethe Center she is currently directing a research project funded by the Targeted Socioeconomic research (TSER) program of the EU on Working and Mothering: Social Practices and Social Policies.